This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Today is the spring equinox (11:02 UTC) in the northern hemisphere, and the start of autumn in the southern hemisphere.

This winter in North America has been ghastly. It came early; it's leaving late. The continent has been sitting under something called the polar vortex (a polar cyclone) for months. The vortex dipped unusually far south, set records for storms and snowfall. It closed down the city of Atlanta. Winnipeg, a city renowned for cold temperatures, is having the worst winter in 75 years: in early March, hundreds of people went without water as the frost reached past the seven foot mark where water pipes are buried. Parts of the UK were flooded. People across Canada, the USA, the UK and Europe are having difficulty paying for heating fuel; see reports here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Some observers blame human-induced climate change and global warming for this weather; this winter's extremes may also be due to a natural Arctic weather oscillation, explained in this post.

Several large weather events were so unusual as to deserve their own Wiki entries and news reports:

Thus, we are very happy in the northern hemisphere to mark the turn of the seasons: below the jump, see some futuristic landscape architecture by Charles Jencks. All photographs are from My Modern Met, which interviewed Jencks about his sources of inspiration:

Jencks has made a name for himself in the field of landscape
architecture. Because he's inspired by such far-reaching ideas as
fractals, genetics, chaos theory, and waves, one can't help but think
deeply about each work. As he says, "To see the world in a Grain of Sand, the poetic insight
of William Blake, is to find relationships between the big and small,
science and spirituality, the universe and the landscape. This cosmic
setting provides the narrative for my content-driven work, the writing
and design. I explore metaphors that underlie both growing nature and
the laws of nature, parallels that root us personally in the cosmos as
firmly as a plant, even while our mind escapes this home."

"A concrete staircase that looks like a waterfall and represents the universe."

"Jencks' latest project is in northern England and is called Northumberlandia
(the "Goddess of the North"). Commissioned by a UK coal-mining company,
Jencks is creating to a giant land goddess sculpture that's 112 feet
high and 1,300 feet long. Due for completion in 2013, it will be the
world's largest human form sculpted into the landscape."

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.